The Mob Tears at the Foundations of Civilization in London and America

Watching London burn, one cannot help but sense something has gone awry in the west. London, the cradle of our law, spins toward lawlessness.

The law, the steady framework of our civilization, seems incapable of response. Americans don’t have the luxury anymore of watching the anarchy on television, assuming distance insulates us from the Mob-prowling neighborhoods like Camberwell and Tottenham. The howling rage has even come to our own Midwest.

Hopefully time and wisdom will reveal what has fractured, but for now, we are certain of some things.

We know that the House of Reeves in Croydon, South London, is a pile of ash and rubble. This furniture business had been in the Reeves family for 141 years, surviving even Hitler’s blitz. But the Mob burned it down. “I'm the fifth generation to run this place,” said owner Graham Reeves, “I have two daughters. They would have been the sixth.” It was a fixture in Croydon, which may have been its doom. The Mob loves to devour the fixtures of civilization. The Mob also delights in the destruction of a father’s dream for his daughter. We’ll return shortly to why this may be.

We know that the Mob is forcing victims to undress, to turn over family heirlooms such as wedding rings. We know the weapon of choice for this British Mob is fire.

We now sense that the British government is hopeless. A government that as recently as 1970 made “arson in a royal dockyard” a hanging offense dithers over whether to employ water cannons against the Mob. Americans who, for generations endearingly considered England a model of civility and decorum, know something must have failed catastrophically, but what?

We also now know the Mob has visited America in recent days and years.

Consider the Wisconsin State Fair last week. The 911 tapes reveal a nightmare. “We’re outside the Wisconsin State Fair and there’s a white guy being beaten up by about 100 black people,” the panicked caller cries. “They’re jumping on our cars. . . . My mom just got attacked by a black mob.” Multiple eyewitnesses describe white fairgoers being pulled from cars and beaten by the Mob, all black. The evidence establishes a strong presumption that race was a motivating factor in the attacks. This is America?

Like in England, the law is also failing the victims in Wisconsin. “My wife comes home with a fricking black eye, and you guys ain't doin' (expletive) about it?” another 911 caller complains. “You need to get the (expletive) riot squad over there and haul them off to jail.”

We know that something similar happened in the town of California, Pennsylvania this year. We know that Darnell Harding, a linebacker for the local college football team, and Toni Whiteleather, a defensive back, were charged with attacking Michael Chambers. Chambers was an innocent bystander who had the misfortune of running into the two athletes just before Harding, the linebacker, said he was going to “hit the first white person he saw.”

As in London, the law has failed Chambers. Prosecutors dropped the state hate crimes charges in June after they failed to subpoena the victim to give evidence for a preliminary hearing. The Obama administration has also failed Chambers, as we shall see.

The law has failed Marty Marshall and his Akron, Ohio, family. On the Fourth of July in 2009, he was watching fireworks in his front yard with his wife and children. A mob of 30 to 50 black teenagers went onto his property and beat up Marshall, his wife, his children and two adult male friends. “This is our world. This is a black world,” they taunted the injured victims. Marshall spent five nights hospitalized in critical care.

Of course there are federal hate crimes laws designed for these violent racially motivated attacks, right? But a law is only as good as the people enforcing it. The Justice Department under Eric Holder has little interest in bringing hate crimes charges to protect white victims. The corrupt dismissal of the New Black Panther voter intimidation case, which I brought, made that plain.

The criminal section of the civil rights division has the responsibility to prosecute racially motivated violence. But Mark Kappelhoff, the chief of the criminal section of the civil rights division, is unlikely to act if the victims are white. He was angry that the DOJ enforced the law on behalf of white victims in the voting rights case of United States v. Ike Brown. According to the sworn testimony of former voting section chief Christopher Coates, Kappelhoff complained equal enforcement of the law to protect whites was causing problems with “its relations with civil rights groups.” He placed greater importance on political relations with civil rights groups than ending discrimination against white voters.

Through Kappelhoff’s attitude, we gain insight into a worldview that excuses wrongdoers because of whom they victimize. We glimpse the opening passages of a rotted storyline with tragic final chapters.

The Mob thrives off such moral equivocation. The Mob is decisive when the law is not.

To some, the Mob is a symptom of disenfranchisement, urban malaise or institutional hurt feelings. The Mob, after all, only awoke after a questionable police shooting in London. Excuses all, of course. Nothing justifies this behavior in nations built on the rule of law. Excuses are paralyzing those with the responsibility of enforcing the law, both in England and the United States.

Let’s return to the question of why. Many have absolute confidence about what we are witnessing. They can surely imagine the whispers of Wormwood to a thousand Patients. Delighted that the Mob has bypassed the gradual path toward evil, they can imagine him basking in the heat of burning double deckers in Peckham. They know who delights in a father’s dream for his daughter destroyed. Others perhaps imagine Legion, who admits in the Gospel of Mark, “We are many,” before being cast into the maniacal herd of pigs by Christ. No longer simply pigs, the maniacal herd for our times now roams London and stalks families in Milwaukee and Akron.

Whatever has fractured, whatever has failed, we need to discover and right it. Law, informed by a reverence for human dignity, has lifted our nation, our civilization, out of the darkness of history. The mayhem and violence we are witnessing provides a glimpse of an uncivilized age beyond our memory, before law ruled.

Perhaps the civilized will outnumber the uncivilized. Or, perhaps the burning and looting provides instead a preview of our future.

Sir Winston Churchill understood this. “Civilization will not last,” he said at the University of Bristol in 1938, “freedom will not survive, peace will not be kept, unless a very large majority of mankind unite together to defend them and show themselves possessed of a constabulary power before which barbaric and atavistic forces will stand in awe.”

That we have a President that contemptuously expelled this great man’s bust from the Oval Office only increases our task.

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